But we don’t know any details about Olga other than her desire to mooch, so the best real-world examples of Julia may be from England. We have Natalija, a Lithuanian immigrant who has quickly learned bad habits of dependency, and Danny and Gina, two native-born scroungers.

Natalija, Danny, and Gina all decided to get a free ride from taxpayers, largely because overly generous handouts meant that they could enjoy higher living standards by staying at home and watching TV rather than living productive lives.

And if these info-graphics are any indication, there must be lots of people in the United Kingdom who make similar calculations.

Unfortunately, the same misguided policies exist in the United States. I shared a remarkable chart last year showing that a household would be better off with $29,000 of income rather than $69,000 of income because of the combined impact of both taxes and redistribution programs.

Now, courtesy of some first-rate journalism by a local television station, we have a powerful example exposing how the system operates. We learn the story of Kristina, who chooses to earn less money in order to keep the taxpayer-funded gravy train rolling.

We’ve all heard the line that America is becoming an entitlement society or welfare state, with half of U.S. households now receiving some type of government benefit. But a CBS 21 News investigation has taken that stat one step further to show you how much people are actually getting for free. A few years ago, reporter Chris Papst worked with a single mom who had two children. She turned down a raise because she said the extra money would decrease her government benefits. It was hard to understand why she did that, until Chris started working on this story. “You do what you have to do as a single mom,” explained Kristina Cogan. “And that’s what I did.” ……she admits living a life off the government can be comfortable. “If you’re going to get something for free, are you going to work for it?” Cogan explained. “It kind of like sucks you in.”

Here are some of the horrific details.

For this story, CBS 21 researched what government programs are available to a single mother of two making $19,000 a year. What we found was incredible. Our family would be eligible for $14,976 in free day care, another $13,400 for Head Start and Early Head Start, $7,148 in housing vouchers, $6,500 for weatherization projects, $400 to pay heating bills, $480 a year for a cell phone, with an extra $230 for a land line, and $182 in free legal advice. The family would get more than $6,028 in food assistance and another $6,045 in medical assistance. The mother is eligible for $5,500 in Pell Grants for school with an additional $12,000 for the Education Opportunity Grant; SMART Grant; and TEACH Grant. Our family would also get $6,800 in tax credits, and $1,900 in withholding would be returned. Add it up and this family can get $81,589 in free assistance.

There’s nothing in the story to suggest that Ms. Cogan is utilizing all these programs, but the plethora of available goodies certainly helps to explain why so many people decide it’s easier to be moochers rather than producers.

Which also explains why the welfare state is a recipe for ever-increasing dependency, as shown by this famous set of cartoons.

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America, being on top, does not have to become an entitlement society to fall hard and fast from its current heights — taken for granted by voter-lemmings. It only needs to become a bit more of an entitlement society than the fastest and most competitive economies of the world. That seems to be the key quantitative point that those who advocate prosperity through flatter effort-reward curves seem to miss.

The host (the mamma-pig in the famous to this blog cartoon) already faces great competition from other beasts. It does not take much to kill the host. The ecologically proficient voter-lemmings should realize that it does not take much suckling to weaken the host to the point where she’s overtaken by other creatures. But voter-lemmings have their own dissonant biological programming. They are torn between their delusional desire for other people’s altruism (and democratic power to impose it) and the reality of their own selfishness (*).

(*) If you think you are an altruist, do the following quick thought experiment: Imagine each one of your relatives, friends, acquaintances going bankrupt and try to think how much of your wealth and income you would be willing to put forth to save them: So say for your parents you may give 40%, for your siblings 15% etc. If by the time you reach your cousins you are still honestly above 5% (that is $2500 annually to your cousin if you are making the average 50k annual US income), then my hat of off to you. You are a true altruist. Yet, most voter-lemmings apparently hope that other people will muster enough ambition to work and outcompete international competition to then forcibly offer 40-60% of their effort to distant unknowns.

P.S. Extremes are interesting and infuriating, but the essence of welfare decline is at the core.
ObamaCare alone, is about to create marginal tax rates of the order of 50% for middle income Americans. There is simply no way around it when a subsidy of 20K per year must be phased out between the incomes of 30k and 90k and the phase-out must be added to progressive scale federal and state income taxes. This is NOT something that can be fixed by “sculpting” the legislation. It is an entitlement that people are increasingly expecting (and you dare campaign on withdrawing it!), and one that many people are already figuring into their lifetime plans. Lifetime plans of more mediocrity, lifetime plans of hope that someone else, someone smarter, someone more intelligent or simply someone harder working will produce to insulate them from the international consequences of mediocrity.

P.P.S. The delineation between takers and givers in such a society (eg. European welfare state) is blurred. There are no clear takers and givers. Most people become simultaneously a willing taker and forced giver, with the state apparatus of politicians and government employees being the paid monopoly intermediary. The problem is that the relationship between the true market value of what you make and the true market value of what you receive is broken (or very weak — weaker than in other societies that will eclipse yours). Result: A one to two percent growth trendline and a prosperity level destined to be drowned in short order by a world tide rising at 5% annual growth.

P.P.P.S Even more striking, don’t just look at what the poverty levels have done since mandatory compassion became law. Look at the income relationship progression between America’s poor and the average world income.

I lay part of the problem at the door of our official government statistics, which do not count government benefits as part of family income. This means a person such as the hypothetical woman in the news piece could be receiving over $80k and yet show up in the statistics as perpetually poor.

It’s the difference between saying: Aw, the poor dear has only $19k to live on, let’s throw more money at her.